Some months ago, I wrote about Readmill: the social ebook reading experience. I praised the design and the overall user experience, but at the same time I argued that because I have so many physical books and so few ebooks, I needed Readmill (or someone else) to create a Spotify for books rather than just a good reader.

Mofibo: streaming danish books

Readmill is still just Readmill. And I still like it, though I hardly ever use it for anything but professional literature, because most novels I read are still physical books. But this might change soon.

Morten Strunge, a danish serial entrepreneur, has recently launched Mofibo which aims to become a Spotify for books. I have used it during the weekend and at a first glance it seems to be everything I asked for in my original post. The price of Mofibo is the same as Spotify, which feels fair as long as the content is vast and good.

I managed to find a good book in a few seconds and during my initial browsing, I found myself eagerly adding more good books to my digital bookshelf that I look forward to read during my summer holidays.

I was afraid that it would be the usual selection of mainstream literature, but I was happy to see that there was a wide selection of really good Scandinavian authors such as Hans Otto Jørgensen, Karl Ove Knausgård, Erlend Loe and Per Pettersson to name a few.

How should Mofibo improve?

In general, Mofibo still feels a bit rough. I had a really hard time signing up, but got it working after a while. The app still has small bugs, which is hardly acceptable for a commercial product in the long run.

Furthermore, it surprises me that the app feels so closed – as opposed to a digital ecosystem. I have created myself a Mofibo profile, but it’s not available anywhere outside the app. I can follow my friends and access my “bookshelf” and my “readinglist” but only from the app, not on the website and so on.

As a user experience designer, I think I would have done that differently, but who knows what the Mofibo roadmap contains, perhaps it’s all in the pipeline.

Will I be using it?

Though the overall user experience design leaves room for improvement, Mofibo is about books, and books are text. I don’t need (nor do I want) any fancyness surrounding the text I read. That being said, I would still love to be able read all my Mofibo books in Readmill, because all the small things that matter for a good user experience, are just so much better in Readmill, but Mofibo gives me access to the content that I want. That’s why Mofibo is very likely to enter the position that Spotify and Netflix already has in my life: something that I happily pay for every month without even thinking about it.

Will Mofibo become international?

It doesn’t say directly anywhere on the website, but I guess it will. The idea of streaming good quality literature based on a monthly fee is too good to stay within the boundaries of one (very) small country, so Denmark is probably just the beginning.

I just read a really good book about experience design. It’s called Why we fail and it’s written by Victor Lombardi. As the title says, the book asks the question of why some experience designs fails while others succeed.